Chapter 27 We Go On
WE GO ON
We drove to Chemnitz. It didn’t even take an hour on the Autobahn.
“It took us two days to get to Chemnitz,” I told the others.
“The helpful soldier had told me that I could request a lift from any military vehicle headed in our direction, so we had high hopes of at least getting to a train station that was still operational. Perhaps the lift would have been forthcoming a week earlier, but now?” I shook my head.
“Oh, there were military vehicles, all right.
Trucks carrying troops on benches, supply columns.
They were almost all headed east, though, to the front.
“More lambs to the slaughter,” Dr. Becker said, as we trudged along with our rucksacks.
I asked, “Can you still pity them, then?” and he said, “At times. At least in the abstract.”
It had been cold that day, and cloudy, too, or perhaps that was the smoke that still hung in the air. It felt as if I’d never get the stink of it out of my nostrils. At first we looked back often, hoping for that lift, but after an hour or so, we gave it up.
We were only four in a stream of refugees.
The lucky ones walked beside wagons pulled by a horse or perhaps a donkey, their belongings piled high on their carts, or pushed three-wheeled handcarts or wheelbarrows before them.
Most, though, trudged along with their bundles and parcels, with suitcases that they switched from hand to hand.
Nobody, it seemed, knew any more than we did, and when the time for lunch came and went, we were walking still.
At last, we came to a crossing. A tiny road only, with no signpost. Dr. Becker said, “We’ll turn to the north here.”
“Why?” I asked. “It means going out of our way.”
“There’s a village down here,” he said. “Cossmannsdorf. I used to have a patient there. He sometimes paid me in vegetables.”
I stopped where I was. “But that’s too dangerous.”
He said, “We must find something to eat. Water, too. I probably won’t even see him.”
I had no answer to that, so we turned and walked on. The road wound uphill, the wind blew, and our steps grew weary. I was very thirsty. We had one flask that we’d filled with water before we’d left, but the water was gone.
It took four hours in all to reach the town. When we passed the first few houses, I said, “They’re still standing.”
“Yes,” Dr. Becker said. “The Allies don’t bother bombing the villages. Unless, of course, they miss.” Which wasn’t exactly hopeful, this close to Dresden.
We kept on, and finally reached a Gasthaus, an inn.
It seemed to be the only public building in the village.
We went inside and found a tiny room with a few well-scrubbed wooden tables, and a plump woman—how few plump women one saw anymore!
—scolding a boy, saying, “I don’t care if the Hitler Youth are holding ten exercises.
You need to fill the woodbox before you go. ”
Dr. Becker waited, and when she was finished and the boy had trudged out, red to the tips of his ears. asked, “May we get lunch here?”
She spread her arms wide. “Do I look as if I have lunch? Do you see anybody eating it?”
“No,” Dr. Becker said. “But I hoped. The children are hungry and thirsty, you see. Water, perhaps?”
“We have ration coupons,” I put in. “And money.”
She heaved a gusty sigh. “Sit down, then. I have soup and a bit of bread. You can have that.”
The soup, when it came, was made of potatoes and cabbage, and the bread was made, surely, of wheat and rye.
We fell on the food with gratitude and were sorry when it was gone, and when I offered payment, the woman waved me away, saying, “It’s little enough I can do.
Do you come from Dresden, then, or farther east? ”
“From Dresden,” I said.
“It was very bad, we hear,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “It was as bad as you’ve heard.”
She looked at me more closely. “Did you lose people, then?”
I had to swallow. “Yes. My father and mother and the—our friends. My uncle and his children found me, though, and we are together now, you see.”
“Family is always better,” she said, and I agreed. How to explain that the Beckers had already begun to feel like my family? One clings to what one has, and I didn’t want to think about my parents. I’d buried that pain deep inside. I couldn’t afford it now.
She said, “The little boy looks peaky. Let me fetch a bit of milk.”
She brought not one, but four cups, and I drank gratefully, though I had not before enjoyed the taste of milk. Dr. Becker asked, “Where can one still get a train, do you know? We’re trying to get to Chemnitz.”
“Oh, it’s very bad there,” she said. “There won’t be anything for you there.”
My heart sank, but I said, “We have to go somewhere, and I don’t know where would be better.”
“Oh, nowhere is any better,” she said. “Not now.”
“Are any of the trains running?” I asked.
“The ones to the east will be running first, you can count on that. To the west? From Freiberg, yes, that part of the line is still running, at least today.”
“How far is that?” I asked. “To Freiberg?”
She sucked her teeth. “On the paths? Ten or twelve miles at least. By road? Sixteen. And it’s a steep climb, the road to Freiberg.”
I looked at Dr. Becker in dismay. She said, “The milk cart will be going to the station early tomorrow, as always. You can ride with the cans if you like, with Hans. He’s a bit simple, but an amiable fellow. I’ll tell him to take you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Please. Is there anyplace to find a bed? Would we speak to the mayor, perhaps?” Every move, I’d learned in these past few days, had to be cleared with the authorities.
“With the mayor, certainly,” she said. “If he can’t find you a place, you can sleep in the barn.”
We did sleep in the barn, along with seven other refugees.
That was what we were now—refugees like all the others.
The woman, Frau Meier, gave us supper, too: potatoes and red cabbage fried with a bit of fat bacon, and ersatz coffee to drink.
It tasted heavenly—well, not the coffee, but the rest. And at seven the next morning, a parting slice of bread in hand, we rode to the station amidst the milk cans.
I climbed up first and said, “Oh, how wonderful to be riding instead of walking! Look, Gerhardt, it’s an adventure! ”
He just looked at me, then politely said, “Yes, Cousin Daisy.” So much for being jolly. I’d have to settle for not actively whining. Fortunately, my parents had taught me well.
“So did you catch the train?” Ben asked. We were in the outskirts of Chemnitz, which looked modern and not in the least ruined. How amazed I would have been if I could have looked ahead and seen myself today, so old and so well fed!
“Eventually,” I said. “It was hours late and so full of soldiers and civilians, we had to stand in the corridor. Some of the soldiers complained about ‘all these people traveling for pleasure, taking up all the room,’ which was at least a bit amusing. It wasn’t so amusing when the train suddenly began to reverse.
They had word of an air-raid, you see, and were trying to back into the woods again before it arrived, so the train would be hidden.
We crouched on the floor, as little help as that would be, as we heard the explosions and expected death at any moment.
As it happened, the track wasn’t even destroyed.
There were craters all around us as we proceeded, but the bombers’ aim had fortunately been bad.
As a result of all the delay, though, we didn’t reach Chemnitz until six that evening, when it was already dark.
Oh, how hungry we were! Frau Meier had given us a bit of bread and cheese for breakfast, and had even pressed on us a few very wrinkled apples, but I wasn’t used then to going without meals.
The others took it as a matter of course.
How humbled I was, those first few weeks! ”
Sebastian pulled to a stop outside the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, and asked, “Does it look the same?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks old, certainly, though Chemnitz was bombed as badly as Dresden just a few weeks after we’d passed through.
Who knows, if we’d been allowed to stay, whether we’d have lived through it?
I don’t know the answer to your question, though, because I never saw it from outside. ”
Had I ever known before, I wondered on that night, how uppermost food and drink were in one’s mind when one didn’t have them? It was such an obvious thing to realize, and yet I never had.
The train station was as crowded with both soldiers and civilians as the train had been. We headed to the entrance, but an official asked, “Do you have a place to stay?”
“No,” Dr. Becker said, “but we’re hoping to find one.”
He shook his head. “Nothing to be had. Go back there.” And pointed.
It was much worse than the airport: an enormous room without windows, in which the welfare organization had set up scores of bunk beds.
The air was hot and smelled unpleasantly of diapers, a forest of which were hung around a wood stove and steaming gently.
Babies cried; children whined; mothers exhorted their children loudly and called to each other.
We were given bread and jam, along with tea that was slightly less weedy than at the airport, and were glad enough of it, but afterwards, I found myself fighting a strange sort of panic.
The room was too hot, too noisy, too smelly.
It was all too much, and weak as I knew it made me, I had to fight to keep from crying.
Or, perhaps, screaming. I got up from my bunk and told Dr. Becker, who was lying on the bed across from me, “I’m going to sit in the waiting room.
Gerhardt is already asleep, I see. Well, he’s had a long day. ”
Dr. Becker sat up himself—he had to hunch, for the space wasn’t enough for a man to sit upright—and said, “Be careful.”
I didn’t know what he meant. Be careful of my safety?
Personal danger seemed unlikely in a place as crowded as this, and with a populace too frightened to step out of line.
Be careful not to give us away? How could he imagine I would?
I merely nodded, though, and wound my way through the bags and bundles to the waiting room.
It was much cooler here, although full of soldiers talking and playing cards. I hitched myself up to sit on the baggage counter, folded the top of Dr. Becker’s coat to make a sort of pillow, and lay down.
Below me, the soldiers bickered and joked as young men anywhere will do.
They didn’t talk about the war, about Hitler, about their own chances of survival.
They just played cards. And I didn’t think about the war, about Hitler, or about my own chances of survival, either.
I just went to sleep and was grateful for the escape of it.
“Where to next?” Sebastian asked.
“Oh, back to Dresden,” I said. “Although we could have lunch first, I suppose.”
“Really, Oma?” Alix asked. “I thought you wanted to take us around the places you went.”
I said, “I find myself less enthusiastic about that than I’d imagined I would be.
We traveled like that for a month, trying to find a place we could stay.
From town to town through Saxony and then on to Bavaria, which the Americans must surely reach before the Russians did.
Walking sometimes, getting a lift on a farm wagon, a train ticket to someplace else with no room at the inn.
Permission to travel from a Party official, a bed for a night or two arranged by the mayor.
Buying a bowl of soup here—how I came to despise potatoes!
—an ersatz coffee there, a piece of bread somewhere else, as our stomachs shrank and our waistbands gapped, as more and more refugees clogged the roads and the war went on and on.
As people dared to say they were tired of Hitler, exchanged the latest war news, and asked, again and again, ‘Where are the Americans? What can be taking them so long? The war must be over in a day—a week—a fortnight.’ Longing for Germany’s defeat as they’d once longed for its victory.
We were never permitted to stay more than a night or two, for everywhere we went, people had enough problems of their own. ”
“That sounds horrible,” Ben said. “I hated moving even one time.”
“Yes,” I said, “when you had to come to live with Sebastian. I heard about that. The most important thing to know about refugees is that they’re tired.
So very tired. Their feet hurt, their shoes wear out, they huddle under trees for protection from rain, and their winter coat becomes heavy over their arm, for now it’s spring.
They have no routine and no knowledge of what the day will bring for themselves and, worse, for their children.
Life or death? Food or starvation? Safety, or exposure to the Gestapo?
That alone is exhausting. How they wish for a place to unpack their few belongings, to get up in the morning and have a job to go to, something to do besides move on!
To be able to put their children to bed and have a book to read to them.
To know they’ll be sleeping in the same place all week, even if it’s a barn. ”
“I thought you went to Bayreuth,” Alix said. “To Frau Heffinger’s sister.”
“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not for today. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.”